


On Oysters and Black Water

by docnoctem



Category: Gorillaz
Genre: M/M, blanket warning for the general toxicity of plastic beach, contains excessive drinking, mentions of vomiting, nightmares and hallucinations, no physical violence at all but bad times psychologically, overall troubled mental health status for the old cap'n but stu's fresh out of sympathy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-28
Updated: 2019-03-28
Packaged: 2019-12-25 22:53:58
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,808
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18270800
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/docnoctem/pseuds/docnoctem
Summary: "The sea has designed ways to survive for millennia—despite the waste polluting it, the sea is stronger." A glimpse at a mind in decline, another in revolt, and the filtration system on an island made of rubbish.





	On Oysters and Black Water

**Author's Note:**

> Quick pre-note: Some liberties have been taken with the details of Plastic Beach! The timeline is a little wonky, so apologies for just guessing at exactly how long they’re on the island proper.

Along the mock shoreline—slick banks compacted from endless discarded bottles, would-be dunes marked by sedges of fishing twine and torn surfboard straps—small tide pools form. Taking stock of the perimeters of the massive garbage barge, he’s found the pools to be unexpectedly common, spotted all around the grottos of melded plastics. It’s remarkable to see real, observable life adapt in the seemingly random dips and divots of the debris. The water collected there is so dark with runoff that the vibrant pink plastic below colors it like cloudy wine, but those blessed with oysters are clear enough that he can make out the occasional lettering detail on a license plate or novelty keychain embedded beneath. It’s still a grim-looking basin filled with brine, but the oysters filter it until it’s livable, even if only to other bottomfeeders. Small and ugly life sustains smaller, uglier life.

The sea has designed ways to survive for millennia—despite the waste polluting it, the sea is stronger. Crouching down with a decade-old leathery boot settled on either side of the crude seascape, Murdoc thinks it’s something like humbling and something very much not.

“Oi.” He flags her down and gestures to one of the clearest tide pools, and she silently gathers the oysters into the utility bag strapped high on her leg. From this angle, he can see straight through the bullet hole in her metallic skull, jagged edges from the exit wound curling into the brim of her cap. He doesn’t look away, whether he wants to or not. He hasn’t really earned the right  _not to_  see what he made her, not when he’s given her everything from her face to her circuit board to that hole in her head. He’s the reason it’s there, and he’s the reason they’re here.

The dues he’s been paid seem fair, but he doesn’t count himself a real fan of fate’s wit. He has what he’s earned, he supposes. He has snotty shellfish in their own shallow little seas, unknowing of where they’re stuck—unknowing of being stuck at all—unknowing of how much more they are than this island of misfit toys and other forgotten rubbish. He has her, and she has a familiar face and firepower. He has a studio, a rolodex, an orchestra, a confession, an honest sort of cowardice from a wasteful existence passing judgment on wasteful existence. He has a banjo. He has a concept.

None of that matters because he has a singer who doesn’t sing. His ward sleeps and scowls the days away in silence. Murdoc knows he’s fixed the busted Casio he plucked from the beach’s endless detritus and has been mixing sample tracks down in private, but he won’t so much as glance at the keyboard or drag a fingertip over his web-disabled tablet screen if he’s aware of Murdoc’s presence; even when he’d station her on guard outside his door for entire days and nights at a time, she never reports hearing a single note in his voice. He sees him at a distance, whether they’re at ends of the island or at an impasse face to face. Even the distinct broken eyes he’d given him, so black and fishlike and eerily reflective, have gone a haunting pupilless white. He has a body in a room, but he doesn’t have Stuart.

In the beginning, Stuart seemed to move in a daze if he moved at all. He’d spoken once that first day, a low _“What’s going on?”_ in a tone that would’ve been threatening if it had been any less queasy. Murdoc can remember smiling with all of his teeth, eyes so wide and disconcerting that the edges of his fringe flattened by an old captain’s hat parted around his lashes. He’d simply told him they were making an album, he had a concept, Gorillaz wasn’t done—less and less comforting assurances that this was in fact his reality now and not a nautical withdrawal nightmare. The lower half of the island had creaked like a ship’s hull to punctuate, and Stu’d promptly been sick on the bed. It had taken a couple of weeks to develop their filtration system; during that time Stuart had the unfortunate options of sleeping under his soiled blanket, or bracing against the strong chill of night by layering on nearly all of the clothes Murdoc had brought him, adorned with stripes and anchors and other degrading cabin boy quirks. The sight his cap-sleeves and scarves made was so whimsical and mismatched to the freezing darkness of submersion in a deep, desolate sea that they looked more like costume pieces, pressed and hung wrongly on his rigid frame. Through those weeks, his shivers lessened, his glares deepened, and his silence turned more defiant.

Midway through their third month on the island, he’d stopped locking Stuart’s door. There wasn’t any need—he couldn’t operate the submarine that brought them here, and the man barely left his room as it was. He’d roam corridors at times, looking for something that was never there, but on sight of Murdoc his face would harden and he’d retreat to his quarters, perfectly content to let them both waste away in a stalemate. Having a weaponized security detail helped, but arming her barely made a difference when they both knew full well he’d never risk his golden goose; she’d escort Stu to the studio at Murdoc’s request only for him to stand still and silent as stone in the doorway, unfamiliar white eyes locked straight ahead. He showed no interest in what Murdoc laid out for him, in his synths or the booth or the flood of papers scattered over the desk, littering the floor, stuck in overlapping lines on the corkboard. He made no effort to critique or even acknowledge the words Murdoc presented him, not when he’d arranged them in notebooks and not when he’d scrawled his odd disconnected thoughts directly on the walls themselves. Murdoc would offer an unopened bottle of rum for Stu beside the soundboard while he downed his own, working through the days on demos and pitching samples against the other man, but Stuart only ever painted his face in shades of sour passivity and made sure he would glean nothing he could use from him. Not one single thing.

Murdoc doesn’t know how to do this with Stuart, and he doesn’t know how to do this without him—he made that much clear when he put him in that room.

By the time Murdoc’s knees ache enough to make him stand, she’s already long gone from his side to rehome the oysters into the series of tanks, bins, and tubs cobbled together to make up Plastic Beach’s slipshod filtration system. The water can’t be made fresh by their work alone, but it’s clean enough for a wash. Clean enough to soak the meager assortment of clothes he’d arranged for himself or for Stuart, rank with sweat and salt and booze and vomit. Clean enough to serve some purpose, to justify his want to steal the oysters from the small worlds they’d found and watch the filth fade over the blurring of hours and days.

‘Clean enough’ still wasn’t fresh, though, and that was becoming a problem. When he first bought the island and arranged the rot to make room for full studio equipment and two bedrooms and all of his ungodly stupid machinations, he’d built up generous stocks of military food rations, drinkable water, and appropriately tropical booze. Six months in, it’s becoming clear which of the options he’d prioritized. Honestly, Murdoc hadn’t really considered the eventual promise of dehydration his problem; he didn’t know where they’d be by now, or if they’d be there together. He didn’t entirely expect he’d still be alive.

Inside, she’s deposited the oysters into the roomiest basin available. The elaborate setup of tubs and tanks sprawls half of the level’s wing, spilling down from the unworking kitchen sink all the way to the old clawfoot bathtub stood alone in what was ostensibly a restroom, but contained none of the amenities or proper pipes. The kitchen itself is mostly furnished with dated appliances, but their crisis-ready food supply is stored a level below in an oversized closet; the permanent sea smell of the entire floor is nauseating.

He almost calls her by name, the wrong name, purely on instinct. She registers his presence and turns with inhumanly smooth movement, rotating her whole body on the axis of one ankle before snapping the wrongly-turned foot forward again, and the instinct dies in his chest.

Murdoc looks at the overfull collection of bins behind her, each holding seawater varying in visibility. The oysters rest at the bottom, seeming utterly still but for the gentle ripples in the water’s surface distorting them slightly. He can’t really see the water changing in any visible way, not just gawking for a minute or five, but he’s spent hours doing it in the past. Surrounded by emptied bottles and too drunk to stand, he’d watch the tanks with an almost obsessive interest until he passed out on the wet floor. He wanted to see how they worked, wanted to watch the murk clear. He still doesn’t understand, even now, but he doesn’t have to—they’re all adrift in this plastic carcass whether he understands how they live or not.

“Can we drink this?”

“I would not advise that.” She states levelly.

“What if we boiled it?” He eyes the aged stove, as useless as everything else in the kitchen. “Could start a fire, yeah? Do it like proper castaways. We’ve got a few pots and pans, haven’t we?”

“Under the present conditions, boiling the brine will only minutely reduce the salt content. It is unlikely to reach brackish classification through boiling, and impossible to make fresh without a desalination system.” Her jaw works up and down but her lips don’t match the sounds coming from her vocal modulator. Her voice hardly registers as a voice at all.

He swallows around a childish plea for her to just sound like she’s meant to and instead says “Dial it back, Small Wonder. Try a humble tongue for a humble man.” He lifts his captain’s hat and holds it in front of his chest faux-modestly. The line of his mouth twitches down, noticing how her eyes don’t roll. “Alright. Let’s play Cher and look on the sunny side, say we boil it a couple times and make it bracketed—”

“Brackish. Brackish water contains a salt solution between—”

“S’it gonna kill me to drink it, yes or no?”

She moves her head back only marginally, enough for him to recolor her image as one of artificial judgment. “It is as safe for human consumption as your current alcohol intake.”

Her delivery isn’t smug or especially snappy, but it’s near enough to human if he doesn’t listen too closely. He briefly forgets where they are and reaches out to muss her hair, but catches himself before the jagged metal framing the bullet hole can catch his thumb. He swallows and shoves his hat back on.

“What’s your little survival guide say the soggy bastards lost at sea do?” He asks, tapping on his temple. “Besides findin' a nice angle to piss in their mouths.”

She takes a moment to reference her limited data. “Desalination through evaporation is the most viable method with the materials available.”

Something skitters in his peripheral vision. The dissonance between her digital voice and mouth movement is off-putting, and the smell of seawater and rot concentrated in this room is making him feel lightheaded. He braces a hand against the peeling linoleum countertop. She halts her speech and watches his swaying, as her protocol dictates when he goes unsteady, until he musters up a bit of balance and prompts her, “Go ahead.”

“The process of desalination requires a system of containers to store and protect the seawater attached to a heat-resistant surface, and a secondary container to collect the condensation.”

“And we can build that?”

“With adequate time. It is not a complex system.” He nods, holding the counter to keep upright, but she pauses in consideration. “It would be preferable to sanitize the surfaces in contact with drinking water.”

He eyes her. “Sure.”

“Alcohol can be used as a sanitary agent in—”

“Let’s put a pin in that.” He waves her off with a grimace and almost trips over his own feet in his haste to escape the suggestion and the kitchen’s odor. He dodges tanks on his way out and stumbles down the corridor. Every step brings him further from the soaking rooms, narrow feet slapping much heavier than they should from the constant wetness underfoot, but the dizzying stench never seems to lessen. She follows him dutifully, her own steps barely audible if not for the weighty clamor of the shotgun slung across her shoulders.

Murdoc stops by the long stretch of windows overlooking the plastic beachfront. He didn’t always join her on security detail or scavenging like he had today, but when he did venture out of the studio and into the coastal landfill it was always in daylight hours. Always when the sky was clearest and the green of the waves sank low beneath the deep blue shimmering to match. He saw little reason to continue past dusk, a sensation two steps removed from fear settling inside him in the night—even at this distance, with the evening only just beginning to set in over the sea, the growing blackness of the water floods his lungs with something smoky and sulfurous and  _wrong_. It doesn’t match. He isn’t a brave man, and the lifetime of fear he’s nested in himself like brambles only underlines the discrepancy of the tightening in his chest. He knows what it means to be afraid. He knows he isn’t afraid of drowning.

He doesn’t turn away from the view despite the pull in his gut because he’s spotted something bright and recognizable at the water’s edge, something else misplaced against the backdrop. He’s spotted Stuart.

“Should I begin sorting the recovered scrap material for suitable components?” She asks.

Stu’s stood far below him with his back to the height of the island but turns then, briefly, to face them. The setting sun must be casting the window’s reflection an opaque orange, and Murdoc knows he can’t really see them. Maybe he can sense the eyes on him, or maybe he does it for no reason at all. He’s just too distant to tell.

Murdoc’s gaze stays fixed on Stu long after he turns away again. “No.”

He’s sure she doesn’t understand, but she doesn’t question him. She wasn’t built to.

Murdoc meanders down the stairwell with great difficulty, not stopping until he’s collapsed into an old office chair in front of the soundboard. Head lolling, he looks sideways at Stuart’s untouched bottle. To his left sits a laptop, a series of hard drives, a bump of speed on a blank music sheet. To his right, a short stack of notebooks, a rolodex flipped open to vocalists, a yellowy stain where he’d last vomited. Gingerly moving the bottle out of potential breaking range, he lays his head on the board. The switches are all potted down and blur in the foreground of his vision, his own desperate clutter swimming behind them, overfilling his head with everything he’s done for this record and how little he’s got to show for it. There’s nothing he can do about it but screw his eyes shut.

Sleep finds him in time, wearing the same mask it’s worn since he put these walls around them.

In his dreams, Stuart stands as tall as the trees on a wide white beach, rooted just beyond the cloudy lines of foam lingering after the waves. A crown of shells rests atop his head and matted chunks of hair hang on every side, swaying gently in the salt-smelling ocean air like flat palm leaves. The curve of his spine bows his long trunk of a body forward, pulling him closer to the sea, as if the weight of his head is too much to keep him upright. Murdoc always finds himself sprawled on the shore beneath his shade, and he doesn’t know how he’s gotten there. It would be nice if he were a shipwrecked sailor beached here after a harrowing journey at sea, but he doesn’t feel the remnants of any fight or any triumph, doesn’t feel the swells or the surges washing through him. He suspects he’d feel the weight of his story, deep down in his bones, if he were to be Captain Ahab, or Santiago, or the Ancient Mariner—he’s known what it was like, once or twice in his life, to be near enough to a man with a story worth telling. He can’t feel much of anything in that moment but the warm tide kissing his ankles, and that suits him fine. He’s not fussed for feeling so long as he’s looking up at the tall, tall Stuart.

This Stuart looks down at him with eyes like two-way mirrors, at once perfectly reflective and dark like something covering a hidden hollow. His hair looks an off-shade of blue at this angle; it’s too green and too like the oversaturated pictures from the commercial seaside printed on postcards. He isn’t right, but Murdoc feels about as right as he ever has. His body’s gone to sand beneath the tree, the lap of the waves taking more of him away with the water as it smooths his rough edges. Murdoc’s never cared about his details washing away so long as he keeps some shape, some mound of something, motionless and wanting for nothing right here beneath the shade. Here beside this Stuart.

He’s gone to nearly nothing when the water starts to stick. It’s becoming thick and black like tar, long stripes of residue clinging to his body, his beach, dragging with the rising and falling tide into lines first, then fingers, then hands. As they clutch and claw, shiny surface black as burnt flesh, the sea seeps into the sands and stains the encroaching edges until the island looks like it’s been singed.

The hands are too small, he knows that they are. He can’t look down, hasn’t got the muscle to move; he can’t do anything but stare back at himself in the Stuart tree’s mirrored eyes. He can see in the gradually darkening reflection how the shells of Stu’s crown halo his own head, but between them seaweed and distressed sheets of plastic and PVC piping spill forth to overlap what might’ve been his jaw in a scold’s bridle. They sink into the sand, wet and stinking from the tarry water—they disappear into him, and then more flat leaves, more off-blue hair, more suffocating plastic comes to replace it. This Stuart’s eyes are unblinking: his reflection doesn’t waver, not for a moment.

It’s hell, maybe, and that feels right too.

Murdoc rouses late in the day to a greeting of nausea and back ache. Stabbing pain traces a path from the center of his forehead to the base of his skull. He fumbles one hand over the soundboard and pots the levels up only to bring their switches out of his eyeline, their close proximity causing his eyes to cross and his brain to splinter in response. He studies the bottle of dark rum stood untouched where he left it, trying to focus his bleary and crowded field of vision around it while he tampers down the urge to vomit in his mixing chair again; it’s tempting, but just isn’t worth the cleanup. Once he feels his gag reflex under control, he sluggishly drags the bottle to him, loosens the cap and downs a quarter to hopefully circumvent the hangover. Hair of the dog never really worked for long, but he figures the mutt’s going to chew on his throat either way and sobriety doesn’t liven up a mauling much.

The afternoon escapes him as he plays and replays the rough tracks. He listens to the gorgeous, intricate orchestral recordings he’d completed before bringing Stuart on board. He felt sure they’d move him to action, felt sure the incredible weight of such complex and well-practiced harmony would catch him in its sweeping scale, surround and inspire him, and he’d know. He’d know that this album has to be the best they’ve made. It has to be big. It has to be worth it.

He takes a swig as a bubbly maritime keyboard loop starts to play; he hits the back button, replays the orchestra again.

Murdoc knows it’s early evening when she brings him his barely-edible crisis meal, wrapped in nondescript brown packaging and cool to the touch. The hardtack inside might help soak up the slosh of booze in him, but the thought of chewing that right now makes his stomach turn. He chucks it onto a paper stack and watches a few torn sheets flutter up and over the edge of the desk. It only takes a moment for the fallen pages to become indistinguishable from the pages littering the floor already.

This isn’t working.

It just isn’t fucking working.

Neck of the bottle secure in his grasp, Murdoc brushes past her and stalks out of the doorway, out of the main hall, out of the building. The open ocean air stings as it hits his face, but it’s a feeling he’s gotten used to over the months. As he trudges down the slope of the synthetic embankment, what strikes him most isn’t the sounds or the smells or the salt in his eyes; it’s the way the low-hanging sun illuminates the edges of the lighthouse, the rotating beacon inside flashing so bright that it almost looks blue against the slowly warming tones in the evening sky. It’s strange and a little startling to realize, after this much time secluded and in such a finite space, anything could still exist that he’s managed not to see.

Some thirty-odd feet down the coastline, he spots Stuart standing alone once again, front to the water. As he walks, Murdoc wonders how long he’s been venturing out at sundown without his noticing. He wonders if he’s doing it because of the stronger cold that accompanies the night underwater, or if he’s merely tracking Murdoc’s schedule in order to best avoid him.

Murdoc tries to approach Stu quietly, cautious of the ocean spray wetting the sandless shore, but discretion isn’t really possible when there’s nothing else to pull focus for miles upon miles. The unexpected break in isolation has to be why Stu looks so alarmed when his head snaps to him, Murdoc hopes. His face shifts from panic to befuddlement to flat, fallen disinterest in almost comically quick succession. He turns, one overlong wingtip kicking at the tide as he begins walking further down the beach. Murdoc runs his hand over his face, the other still firm around the bottle, and follows him. He comes close to losing balance on the slippery plastic several times, but faithfully stays in stride, just barely grazing the edge of his shadow. Dutifully. As if he was built to.

“S’gonna be dark soon,” Murdoc calls out. Stu shoves his hands in his pockets, shoulders squared, and keeps walking. He doesn’t slow until they near the docks, beside which Murdoc’s submarine sits waiting. It doesn’t really faze Murdoc to see him stood so near to the thing that brought them here. Stu can climb on top and open that latch if he likes, but they both know it’ll do him no good. He’d made significant alterations to the vessel, but it was still designed for Naval use and operated on a secured two-key system. Murdoc feels the first key hung heavy around his neck, and thinks of the second stored in a compartment in her left bicep—the one slipped through the strap on her shotgun.

“Aren’t you hungry?” He tries, then cringes thinking of the vacuum-sealed beans and sawdust. He leans sideways around the other’s taller figure, trying to establish eye contact. “Suppose not. I’d been saving this for our album party, but, ah, I’ll tell you what: you come in and sit with me, we’ll have ourselves a seafood spectacular. Finest bit of clam-diving you’ve done in your life.” His smirk cuts entirely too high into his sunken cheek.

Stu’s hard posture is unrelenting, the view of his profile seeming to sour in repulsion at every breath he’s sharing with Murdoc.

“There’s…  there’s nice, fresh oysters upstairs. Tanks of them. Little dirty raw, maybe. The oven’s DOA but, ah, we can… we can roast them, right in the fire.” A beat. “We can start a fire.”

Stu doesn’t budge but to ball his fists tightly against his thighs. His eyes are difficult to track, but Murdoc’s sure he sees them shifting in the opposite direction.

Enough.

He rounds on Stu, his piss-poor play at amicability dissipating.

“Fuck’s sake, Stu! There’s a studio inside. There is an entire goddamn recording studio with all your bloody bits and bobs, and you’re just fucking around in some stupid little amateur app and pretending you’re not. We could be doing so much and you’re just—just stomping about like a child.” He spits, jabbing a finger at his chest. Stu knocks it away with enough force to throw Murdoc off his unstable footing, his weight hitting the shore with a hard, damp thud. The hand holding his bottle instinctively cradles it to his chest. He scowls, ready to refuse Stuart’s hand, but finds he doesn’t offer it. “Go on then, fucking ignore me! I’m not the one looking ridiculous right now!”

For the first time, Stu wavers a bit. The harsh curve of his mouth twitches, his head tilts to meet Murdoc’s stare. He pauses, and then. Then—

“Fuck you.”

The sound of his voice, rough and raw, takes the wind out of his sails. It’s the first time he’s heard anything but her digital approximation of speech in months. His head becomes engulfed with the immeasurably human sound, it’s putting pressure behind his eyes and filling his mouth, it’s draining down into his chest and stomach. He feels sick and he feels vindicated and he feels so much more and less alone, he feels everything at once collapsed on the ground below him.

Below a tall, tall Stuart.

The flood of recognition comes on so suddenly that it washes everything out with it, and he’s lost before he knows he’s there. He jerks up the hand melting into the ground and works his jaw to be sure he still can. Stu begins walking back the way they came until there’s enough distance between his shade and Murdoc’s sweat-chilled skin for him to amble to his feet again.

He doesn’t know what Stuart needs, but he needs Stuart. He needs him to be here, really here with him, not the way he is now. He needs him or the music doesn’t work. _All of this_ doesn’t work.

“We’re running out of water, Stu.”

Stuart slows to a halt, while Murdoc takes the opportunity to catch up. He stops a few feet out, then unscrews the cap from his bottle and tosses it carelessly inland. Stu turns, the tightness in his jaw unimpressed but uninterrupting.

“She says we can’t drink what’s been filtered,” he lies.

Stu shoots him a reluctant look at that. “Who says, Murdoc?” His voice croaks with disuse.

Murdoc doesn’t know what to call her—the her that isn’t her—so he doesn’t. “She says.”

Stuart’s face is briefly colored in some shade of remorse he doesn’t need. It’s not neon like the shores or jeweled like the sea; it’s dull and it’s fleeting, it’s washed away as soon as it surfaced. It’s not right for his concept, so it’s not of use to him.

“S’good enough for a wash, but we can’t really boil the salt and runoff out enough to keep it down.” He takes a quick swig, more than comfortable weaving half-truths together if it’ll get them back inside. “I thought we’d be further along the album by now. She was meant to restock us when she delivers the master to the label, but… we haven’t got that, have we? We haven’t even got a proper demo for them.”

Stu looks at him, long and quiet, and Murdoc wonders what he’s seeing. The tension locking his jawline doesn’t lessen in understanding, his shoulders don’t slope back down. He just looks at him indifferently, and then he’s looking past him at the horizon, the sinking colors of the day lined stark along the water’s edge. Murdoc breathes a sigh through his nose.

“We could die here, Stu. Do you understand that?”

Stu’s eyes stay above his head. Murdoc watches him, waiting for something, some hint of worrying, of relenting. Anything. His gaze starts to stray past Stuart’s shoulder to the mass of the island jutting up behind him when he finally says, “I guess you’d get what you wanted then. ‘Least if you go first, I’ll get that much too.”

Murdoc’s brows tic under the sweaty clump of his fringe pressed down by his hat, eyes snapping back to Stuart’s face.

“You think that’s what I brought you here for? Just to…” Stuart goes scalding at that, and he glares at Murdoc with such a bone-deep resentment that he stumbles over his response. “That’s not—that’s not what I want.”

Stu huffs under his breath, angling away from Murdoc.

“I’m not interested in what you want.” Every word is raspy but venomous. Stu sounds like a tap that’s been rusted for decades finally turning enough to open, metallic-tasting aspersions just pouring out of him. “I don’t want to _think_ about what you brought me here for. I think everything’s just collateral fucking damage to you.”

“Oh spare me, you have no idea—”

“I know _you_ , Murdoc. Cue the bloody curtains, I don’t need to know anything else.”

Murdoc looks down and away, clutching the bottle. He feels like a smaller, uglier thing than he already is—and he never learned not to bite at something bigger.

“We’re here to make an album. This is about Gorillaz’s legacy.”

“What legacy is that? A recycling campaign in Morse code? You are so full of shit,” he scoffs. “Writin' about how important savin' the planet is when you’ve never done a goddamned thing to make it better... you care about the environment suddenly? You’re really out here, _all the way out here_ , so you can make a record about pollution?”

“So you did read them.” Murdoc notes, quiet and enigmatic. The look Stuart gives him in turn feels knowing in all the worst ways.

“Yeah. I read them.” It’s an acknowledgement, and it’s a brick wall. Murdoc swirls the rum in his hand.

“…What did you think?”

“Bit twee in parts, considering.” He thrusts his arm out behind him and flaps his hand once, as if to appraise the whole of the island. “You’re mad if you think I’m singing a word of that.”

Water laps against the imitation beach, creeping higher to chase the fading light. The way the setting sun dances atop the dirty tides and spills up against the shores looks unearthly, looks too brilliant to be real. It’s pink-hot lava, it’s fluid orange wildfire, it’s burning green in the shadows and breaking white over the coast. He can’t remember how raw, natural color is meant to look against anything but a palette of neon rot, but Murdoc recognizes that this isn’t any kind of nature he knows.

“I hate this.” Stu says, eyes on the horizon, and Murdoc isn’t sure if he’s addressing the ocean or him. “You can write whatever oil spill pastiche bollocks you want, it’s not coming from me.”

He can’t keep his eyes out of the water. The shadows on the tide swim in Murdoc’s vision and make him dizzy. He can see the black creeping around the edges, can see her small hands making for the surface, waiting for nightfall to breach it. The tug of his nails catching on the bottle’s grooved glass feels like all he’s got to ground him, with Stuart so much farther than the shore’s width out of reach. Murdoc brings it back to his lips and chugs another mouthful, swilling the rum until he thinks he can taste it with his teeth.

“You’re not going to make me say I want to save it.” Stu turns and catches his eye as he swallows to make it clear who he’s addressing. “I don't want to save any of it.”

Murdoc can only nod, not as an acceptance of Stu’s dissent but of his lack of footing against it. He makes to sit but thinks better of it, stare locked onto the phantom fingers in the tide, and his indecision ends up more of a drunken stumble than he’d like in this moment.

“It’s a concept. Man began in the sea,” Murdoc supplies, sounding boozy and far away. “Funny little fish turned to funny little lizards turned to ugly little monkeys.”

“And you stopped there,” Stuart mutters.

Murdoc thinks to smirk, but he can’t feel his face mimicking it. He can’t feel his face much at all. “The start of all thinking, breathing, pissing life crawled out of the water, and we’re what’ll crawl back in.”

“I don’t crawl,” Stuart cuts across him sharply, “And I don’t come from this—this wet fucking nightmare.”

Something in the image of Stuart, cloudy and towering and bright, emerging from the depths does ring inherently wrong to Murdoc. In truth, he never really stops feeling their rightful placement—he’s always felt the other man far above him, even puddle-soaked and pit-eyed on the bloody pavement. Theirs is a history of crashing and sinking, it’s breathlessness and it’s mounting pressure on every side, but he’s not sure his own plunging has ever been what’s brought him any closer to Stuart. He’s just pulled him deeper, deeper still until there’s nothing else quite so far down; it’s a lighter thing’s misfortune to be chained to an anchor like Murdoc. He’s always been reaching up and out for him, never kneeling, never diving. It occurs to Murdoc that a man like Stuart is better suited to sailing skies than seas.

The thought verges so near to worshipping that it makes Murdoc’s stomach twist. That’s not what this is about, because that’s not what this can be about. Stu’s left no room to argue.

Lamely, he repeats “It’s a concept.”

“Oh, shove your sodding concept! Look at this, look at where we are! Look at me, Murdoc! Look at me.” Murdoc follows the tense line of his jaw to one sunken, ghostly eye. “And you think it’s all ends and means, you think it’s worth it ‘cause you’re making a record about condoms and cider rings?”

“It’s about human—”

“It’s about  _rubbish!_  That’s what you’ve done this for.” He whips his head around between the looming shape of the island and the approaching darkness of the sea, whips his hand up and down to sum himself up. His look turns so pointed Murdoc wonders if he can see his organs spoiling inside. “It’s rubbish about rubbish… and it’s a lot worse if it’s not.”

Murdoc has to agree with that. He hasn’t got the stomach not to.

He can’t seem to do anything but stand aside and watch the other simmer closer to a boil. Stuart jabs his shoe at a miniature plastic shovel jutting out of the embankment. He prods and prods at it until the brittle neck’s cracked down the middle, but he can’t dislodge it from the beach. Murdoc watches his expression curdle.

“Why couldn’t you just do it yourself? Why can’t it ever just be you?” He spits.

“I need you,” Murdoc’s response comes quickly but his tone doesn’t flatter much, “for the album.”

“For Christ’s—God _dammit_ , Murdoc, why are we recording an album?! Why do you need a bloody orchestra to back you drinking yourself to death? You wanted some big, theatrical fucking breakdown, yeah? Well congratulations, where’s your audience?” Stu winds back and kicks the shovel hard enough to snap the mouth off, his face grotesque in anger. It lands at the very edge of the tide where her fingers caress and grab it, pull it closer until the sea swallows it whole. “Why do you have to drag me down with you? Why couldn’t you just fuck off and rot out here alone?”

_“Because none of it matters if I do!”_ Murdoc snaps, desperately digging into his hair and knocking his captain’s hat away. His eyes are frenzied in the tide. “Because what was it for if we don’t? We make the album, and it fucking means something! If it ends here, she—”

Her hands are stretching further past the wave’s borders, clutching longer after it retreats. Murdoc can feel Stu’s stare piercing through his skull and he forces himself to meet it, only for a moment, before reeling away to gulp his booze.

“You think I didn’t want to—” Stu clamps his eyes shut and breathes out, head falling back until Murdoc can see the full underside of his chin, spotty stubble and scars and all. “You think I didn’t want to do something with it? You think I didn’t want her to hear me?”

Murdoc doesn’t answer him, mouth overfull with rum and regret. She’s grabbing at the edges of the tide pools with hands too thin to hold, but he knows Stuart doesn’t see.

“I wanted to be heard, Murdoc. But there’s no one to hear me now, is there? No one but you.” Before Murdoc can argue, Stu’s stiff and controlled posture seems to come alive. He begins to clap but it looks closer to smacking a loose, angry approximation of a beat between his hands, brows shooting up beneath his hair and eyes going manically wide.  _“All alone!”_  He half-sings, half-spits.

Taking a mockingly jaunty step, he turns on one heel toward the sea, calling out again,  _“All alone!”_  Louder, aggressively,  _“All alone!”_  His tune stumbles further and further off rhythm with each shout until he’s stopped clapping altogether, instead cupping his hands about his mouth as he bellows over the crashing waves,  _“All alone! All alone! All alone!”_  Without meaning to, Murdoc realizes he’s been bracing for the reverb, expecting the sound to bounce back off a wall, off a building, off anything at all. The steady roar of the tides swallowing Stuart’s voice, muffling it to nothing below the swell, carves out a familiar hurt in his head. Maybe it’s the salty chemical air or the alcohol, but he thinks he can feel the surf’s flattening din splitting his ears like amp feedback.

Stu’s shoulders slump, hands falling to hang at his sides in defeat. He looks out over the waves, quiet, as a beat becomes a moment becomes a minute. Murdoc watches his back clench and stutter, the rummy taste of his tongue biting inside his mouth. When he turns back to Murdoc, panting, there’s no smirking or scowling, there’s no pleasure in making his point; he looks like the trapped animal Murdoc’s made him. The contempt in his features is sharp, but sharper along the broken edges.

“You did this, alright? So that’s who you are. This place, all the plastic and the pollution and this, this me—not the good me, not the me I should have been— _this me_. This is what you’ve done, Murdoc. Jesus, you—it’s—it’s never going to go away.” Stuart looks at him like he wants to weep, but would sooner spit in his eye. “This is what you are now.”

Murdoc sniffs drily, audibly, hand scrubbing over his mouth. He presses harder and keeps his pace until he’s rubbed his top lip raw, eyes trained on Stuart’s pose, taut with frustration. He knows he’s right, and he knows it’s useless to fight that. He just doesn’t know how to be someone who doesn’t.

“What am I supposed to say, Stu? D’you want to me to say I’m sorry? You want me to say I’d have done differently if I could?” The sky’s gone so deeply orange now that Stu’s hair is looking ever more sea-green. His gaze fails him and he scrambles to find focus on the shiny plastic ground; he knows the answer before he asks. “Does it matter anymore? After…” _after this,_  his brain supplies, but his mouth won’t form the words, “is it still gonna matter?”

Stu brings one huge, bony hand up to swipe over the bridge of his nose.

“Fucking hell, Murdoc, I don’t want  _anything_ from you. D’you understand that? Wanting better from you has only gotten me here.” He hisses, thick brows harshly drawn together and shadowing the white-hot nothing his eyes have become. “I want what I’d have been without you. Christ, I want… I want to tie my own bloody shoes, and go ‘round my mum’s for supper when I haven’t done the shopping, and know the future’s on some—some simple fucking mock-up of a course. I want to play pub trivia with a girl from high street and lose, and she’ll still want to shag anyway ‘cos she hasn’t got work in the morning and I’ve got nice blue eyes like she fancies. I want to leave here without your dirty, _corrosive_  fucking fingerprints on my life, and I  _can’t_. Don’t ask how I’d fix what you’ve fucked apart, Murdoc. I don’t want to fix you. I want you to be anything but what you are.”

Murdoc’s spotted a toy car mashed flat into the beach. He’s spotted half a pair of sunnies, and a tape deck sans dashboard, and a smattering of doll parts, and it’s all packed down so tight her little watery hands can’t find the space in between.

“…I am, you know.” Murdoc rasps, guilty fingers pressing and prodding at the swell of his lip until he can feel his teeth behind it. Stu’s weariness is briefly cut with confusion, and he digs harder against the sharp edge of his teeth and clarifies, “Sorry.”

He doesn’t know if he’d expected Stu to soften at that—some stupid, stupid part of him must have—but instead his mouth twists and sputters and then sinks, branches of red prickling up the edges of his white eyes. Stuart presses his palms over them and his curling fingers snag in his hair and rub against the creases of his forehead. Every movement threatens to boil over the rim of his composure, stretches of his skin visibly calloused or overheated—there’s nothing soft about it.

When his hands finally drop, his hair’s disheveled and the skin past his bruised eyelids has gone spotty-pink in irritation. His eyes are glassy and red-rimmed, but they seethe without fluttering, and Murdoc’s a little grateful for that. He isn’t sure he’s ever seen the other look so hateful and so disheartened at once.

“You’re not, though.” Stuart starts. His voice sounds weighty and exhausted, and it’s a far less palatable anger than the sort Murdoc prefers. “You’re not. If you were, you wouldn’t be standing in front of me on this  _fucking island_  saying that.”

He stares at him with all the tenderness of a concrete mooring before stepping closer to Murdoc only so he can look down on him properly.

“A sorry man wouldn’t think he had any right to say that to me when he’s this.” He makes a disparaging gesture to all of him.

Looking up at him now, closer than he’s been in months, Murdoc’s struck by how little the whitening of his eyes changes him. From the day his carelessness blackened Stuart’s remaining unmarred eye, evened his face out with  _matching_ dents, he’s always watched himself in them. For thirteen years he’s been unable to escape his harsh lines, his crooked shapes, his pitiful ugly smallness housed in those glassy reflections. The real joke of it was his inability to simply stop; looking away for long never felt like an option, not when the face they were fixed in was his.

In this moment, his reflection is lost in the milky white, the lights and colors all around them drained in that blank—and still, he’s only seeing himself. He can still see everything he’s made Stuart. He can still see himself, and his choices, and all the ruin he brings clear as ever in the nothingness. They’re adrift at the most remote coordinates on Earth, and he’s looking at Stu in a way that he hasn’t, that he couldn’t since the moment they met, and nothing’s changed but the knowledge that nothing changes. Murdoc would laugh and toast to how much worse the knowing is if he were more sure he wouldn’t heave forward and be sick on their shoes.

He can’t stand to hold the stare and instead drops his eyes to the hollow stretch of his chest, swelling and sinking with every breath. His striped-and-anchored shirt has already gone threadbare, small holes dotted around the seams. Murdoc recognizes that from his own clothes—it was a byproduct of the imperfect briny filtering. The abrasive salt soak left everything stiff and coarse, so much so that he’d pull them dry from wherever they were draped and immediately start to crumple the fabric, scrub it together, wear it down.

Stu seems to let his indignation settle into himself again, ambling back a step and bringing one hand to his temple. Night’s fully fallen now, moonlight glittering brilliantly atop the water. Stu cards his hands through his hair, drags them over his face, wraps them around his middle. Murdoc lets his eyes slip to one of the tide pools, emptied of anything to keep the little ocean alive. The oysters are gone, stolen into his tanks and tubs. Whatever life had found a way there had found no other way out.

“You’ll give me the submarine when it’s finished.” Stu’s voice is stone. Murdoc’s eyes snap up to his. “I sing your songs, and I fix your broken tracks, and we—” he strains around the word like rising bile, “we make this album happen, and beat fucking one after the mixdown you give me the keys. You understand? If I record a single breath on this, I deliver it to the label myself. That’s the deal: I don’t die here. It’s your call if you do.”

Murdoc can only stare, limbs leaden and throat dry. He’d like to have more fight in him over this, to tell him this won’t be what kills them. If he could heed Stu’s wishes and be anything but what he is, he’d like to say this wasn’t what he wanted for them—that he wanted to be made habitable, wanted Stu to clean all the poison in him, take away his pollution and decay and leave his waters warm and impossibly blue. But Stu’s not interested in what he wants.

He nods once, jerky and dissatisfied.

Stu nods in return, more to himself than Murdoc. He stands a few moments longer, looking out into the black sea without panic but with a numbness that seems just as consuming. He silently takes the glass bottle from Murdoc’s hand, draining the last of the rum before passing it back to him. With that, he begins walking away toward the wooden dock.

“Sure you’re not hungry?” Murdoc asks quietly to his back, at a distance once again. “Think we’ve nicked every oyster off the island. Could spare a few.”

Stu glances sidelong at him, tired and confused. “I’m not eating those. They’ve been living in that water, it’s fucking foul.”

“They’ve been cleaning that water. It’s not foul, not at the end.” His voice sounds hollow to his own ears. It would warble if it weren’t so dry. “It’s this,” he gestures to a dark pool at their feet, “and then it’s not.”

Stu seems unmoved.

“That’s sick.” He dismisses.

Murdoc tries to swallow around the static feeling, his throat constricting uncomfortably. “It’s perfect, it’s—it’s a perfect system. Man poisons the well, they drink the poison out.”

Stuart studies him for a moment, face pinched. He’s looking at him like his disgust is so earned and inherent, like it’s the most obvious thing in the world.

“That just puts the poison in them.”

Murdoc keeps still and silent. His knees threaten to buckle and he wants to dry-heave into that filthy tide pool, but he stays upright and watches Stu get smaller and smaller until he’s reached the end of the dock. His figure just becomes a part of it, another piling, another buoy; he looks least like himself in the dark.

He drops his emptied bottle there with the rest of the rubbish.

Murdoc drags and stumbles his way back inside, soaking in the blinding florescent lights on his skin. He climbs the stairwell up and up and up, taking a knee at every floor to gather his stamina. The long damp corridor of the filtration floor bogs him down in the stench of salty rot once again, and he breathes it deep, he pulls it down to the pit of his stomach and holds the thickness in his lungs, drawing his eyes shut and tampering his nausea. The lazy shuffle of his feet still echoes wetly all the way down the hall.

She isn’t there.

The sea-filled tubs make the kitchen sound flowing and alive, with the island’s slight undulations causing small waves on the surface of the water as it sloshes back and forth. He stands in front of the newest and smallest tank, fit for a child, sat on the countertop. It’s housing no more than 4 oysters, their confinement resulting in remarkable productivity. He dips his fingers into the water and admires it; it’s nearly clear, only the faintest clouding. Letting his head rest heavy on the countertop, he grazes his knuckles over the oysters. Their shells are ridged and carved, their shapes uneven and ugly. He traces the short length around their edges, smaller than the palm of his hand, and he thinks they feel like such simple, unassuming things. It seems unreal that they can take all of that nastiness into themselves and not be ruined for it.

It seems unfair that Stuart can’t.

Gripping one relatively flat oyster between his fingers, Murdoc pulls it from the water. The shell is only slightly open and he can’t quite see inside the sliver, more a fracture than a split. Taking a firm hold to the more textured side, he smashes the flat shell against the bend of the counter. It cracks open a bit wider, murky water dribbling out and into the sleeve of his turtleneck. He smashes it a second time, and a third, and a fourth. He smashes it until the lower shell becomes dislodged entirely, splitting and falling to the floor, the impact so dull it’s lost beneath his breathing. The flesh inside is soft and wet, in parts putty and in parts phlegm, and spots of grey-black mar the cream colored meat. The smell wafting up is not unlike the pungent odor of this ocean, compacted down into this room, compacted down into his palm. He runs a long nail along the rim, feeling the slight resistance as it unsticks; he presses harder until his fingertip’s dug into the wetness and he can feel the raised center of the shell along the back of his nail.

He brings the shell to his lips, stinking and lukewarm, and swallows it down.

It’s tepid, and it’s briny, and it’s so slimy in his throat that he thinks he really will retch. He holds himself still on the counter, head tilted back to keep it down. He steels himself and digs into the bowl again, retrieves another, cracks it and dislodges it and swallows it faster.

On his third, he chokes. He can’t take the viscous texture in his mouth or the salty saliva dotting his chin and he sidles to the floor, trousers wetting to his legs.

Leaning back heavily against the wall, he dips his head and peers over the edge of a larger tub to watch the steady rocking of the waves. He could tip the sad imitation ocean he’s put them in at any time, spill their world on the cracking linoleum, but the oysters don’t even know they’re in it. It doesn’t matter what he does, or what he's done. The oysters just continue to live, to filter, to clean.

He isn’t sure what it should feel like—to be clean inside.

He can tell this isn’t it.

**Author's Note:**

> Be careful eating raw oysters! And consider me more sorry than usual for this one. If you think Stu was too harsh here, you're not wrong! But I'm glad to chat more about why I think that's an appropriate thing for him to be.
> 
> You can also find me at tothedarkdarkseas.tumblr.com!


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